HeadPoet

Arriving
By Marge Piercy

People often labor to attain
what turns out to be an entrance
to a small closet
or a deep pit
or sorrow like a toothache of the brain.

I wanted you. I fought you
for yourself, I wrestled
to open you, I hung on.
I sat on my love as on the lid
of a chest holding a hungry bear.
You were what I wanted: you
still are. Now my wanting
feeds on success and grows,
a cowbird chick in a warbler’s
nest, bigger by the hour, bolder
and louder, screeching and gaping
for more, flapping bald wings.

I am ungainly in love as a house
dancing. I am a factory chimney
that has learned to play Bach
like a carillon. I belch rusty
smoke and flames and strange music.
I am a locomotive that wants
to fly to the moon.

I should wear black
on black like a Greek village woman,
making signs against the evil eye
and powder my head white. Though I try
to hide it I burn with joy like a bonfire
on a mountain, and tomorrow
and the next day make me shudder
equally with hope and fear.

One of the reasons I enjoy Marge Piercy’s poetry is that she is of the “nothing unmixed” school of thought. This is a scary, angry love poem. It’s about bears and fires and the evil eye.

And yet the very fierceness of it is what I love about it, the feeling that the emotions are big and elemental and ridiculous, I’ve felt that. And that’s part of being in love.

The Windhover

    To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstacy! then off, off forth on swing,
   As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend : the hurl and gliding
   Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, — the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
   Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

   No wonder of it : shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
   Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

                                            –Gerard Manley Hopkins

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By Catherynne Valente

link

This is a current poem, published in Goblin Fruit, so I am not going to post the whole thing, just a couple teasers:

I am not Demeter’s daughter.
I am Heisenberg’s ripe tomato
I am Niels Bohr’s piece on the side.

In the winter I am a particle.
In the summer I am a wave.
And I didn’t get to be queen of hell
by letting folks off easy.

and

I’m just the fool on the ladder. Up and down, up
and down. Watch me go,
metronome-soul
not death’s wife
but time’s.

I like Valente’s writing. Not uncritically, but I do. She has a nested, intricate, self-referential style that reminds me a little bit of Arthurian stories, and a little bit of the South American magical realists. Her language is rich and ornate and extremely visual, and sometimes I cannot stand to read any more of it, and sometimes it’s all I want to do.

I think you should go get a glass of wine, and a quiet place, and read this poem. I don’t think in the middle of a workday is ideal, but it obviously worked well enough for me. And I think it might help to walk away between the acts, and go do something with your hands. Fold some towels or something.*

Let me say — Goblin Fruit is out there, and they are publishing modern poetry, and it’s always worth reading.

*When you read the next poem, about Millay, you may join me in folding towels and thinking about marzipan fruit dusted with gold.

Rudyard Kipling

1907 and 1922

The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part;
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart.
And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary’s Sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest.

It is their care in all the ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock.
It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock.
It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care to embark and entrain,
Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by land and main.

They say to mountains “Be ye removèd.” They say to the lesser floods “Be dry.”
Under their rods are the rocks reprovèd—-they are not afraid of that which is high.
Then do the hill-tops shake to the summit—-then is the bed of the deep laid bare,
That the Sons of Mary may overcome it, pleasantly sleeping and unaware.

They finger Death at their gloves’ end where they piece and repiece the living wires.
He rears against the gates they tend: they feed him hungry behind their fires.
Early at dawn, ere men see clear, they stumble into his terrible stall,
And hale him forth like a haltered steer, and goad and turn him till evenfall.

To these from birth is Belief forbidden; from these till death is Relief afar.
They are concerned with matters hidden—-under the earthline their altars are—-
The secret fountains to follow up, waters withdrawn to restore to the mouth,
And gather the floods as in a cup, and pour them again at a city’s drouth.

They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.
They do not preach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they damn-well choose.
As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark and the desert they stand,
Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren’s ways may be long in the land.

Raise ye the stone or cleave the wood to make a path more fair or flat;
Lo, it is black already with the blood some Son of Martha spilled for that!
Not as a ladder from earth to Heaven, not as a witness to any creed,
But simple service simply given to his own kind in their common need.

And the Sons of Mary smile and are blessèd—-they know the Angels are on their side.
They know in them is the Grace confessèd, and for them are the Mercies multiplied.
They sit at the feet—-they hear the Word—-they see how truly the Promise runs.
They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and—-the Lord He lays it on Martha’s Sons!

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Robert Service

The God of Scribes looked down and saw
The bitter band of seven,
Who had outraged his holy law
And lost their hope of Heaven:
Came Villon, petty thief and pimp,
And obscene Baudelaire,
And Byron with his lecher limp,
And Poe with starry stare.

And Wilde who lived his hell on earth,
And Burns, the baudy bard,
And Francis Thompson, from his birth
Malevolently starred… .
As like a line of livid ghosts
They started to paradise,
The galaxy of Heaven’s hosts
Looked down in soft surmise.

Said God: “You bastards of my love,
You are my chosen sons;
Come, I will set you high above
These merely holy ones.
Your sins you’ve paid in gall and grief,
So to these radiant skies,
Seducer, drunkard, dopester, thief,
Immortally arise.

I am your Father, fond and just,
And all your folly see;
Your beastiality and lust
I also know in me.
You did the task I gave to you …
Arise and sit beside
My Son, the best beloved, who
Was also crucified.

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The careful text-books measure
    (Let all who build beware!)
The load, the shock, the pressure
    Material can bear.
So, when the buckled girder
    Lets down the grinding span,
The blame of loss, or murder,
    Is laid upon the man.
        Not of the Stuff - the Man!

But, in our daily dealing
    With stone and steel, we find
The Gods have no such feeling
    Of justice toward mankind.
To no set gauge they make us, -
    For no laid course prepare -
And presently o’ertake us
    With loads we cannot bear:
        Too merciless to bear.

The prudent text-books give it
    In tables at the end -
The stress that shears a rivet
    Or makes a tie-bar bend -
What traffic wrecks macadam -
    What concrete should endure -
But we, poor Sons of Adam,
    Have no such literaure,
        To warn us or make sure!

We hold all Earth to plunder -
    All Time and Space as well -
Too wonder-stale to wonder
    At each new miracle;
Till in the mid-illusion
    Of Godhead ‘neath our hand,
Falls multiple confusion
    On all we did or planned -
        The mighty works we planned.

We only of Creation
    (Oh, luckier bridge and rail!)
Abide the twin-damnation -
    To fail and know we fail.
Yet we - by which sole token
    We know we once were Gods -
Take shame in being broken
    However great the odds -
        The Burden or the Odds.

Oh, veiled and secret Power
    Whose paths we seek in vain,
Be with us in our hour
    Of overthrow and pain;
That we - by which sure token
    We know Thy ways are true -
In spite of being broken,
    Because of being broken,
        May rise and build anew.
        Stand up and build anew!

I unabashedly love Kipling. He’s problematic, racist, colonialist, and entitled. And a damn fine poet. He has a few of these deeply engineering poems. He wrote a lot of poetry, so there is some of everything (except for the French prostitutes. If he went through a French prostitute phase, he did not record it the way the Lost Generation did).

The whole holds together, the image of shearing strength, and the unknowable strength or fragility of humans, but the part that gives me chills is:

We only of Creation
    (Oh, luckier bridge and rail!)
Abide the twin-damnation -
    To fail and know we fail.

I often feel like this, that even worse than screwing up is knowing that if you had somehow done things differently, if you had been smarter or stronger or more efficient, it would not have failed. But it’s also true that we all have a breaking strain, a point at which we shatter. It may not be where we think it is, or from the causes we expect.

A bridge can hold a whole parade of people, but if they are all marching in time, they strain the bridge a lot more than if they amble in their thousand separate ways. Sometimes, it seems like the things in our life would be bearable, that we could manage them all, if only they weren’t walking in step.

pity this busy monster,manunkind,

not.  Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim(death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
-electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish
returns on its unself.
			          A world of made
is not a world of born-pity poor flesh

and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence.  We doctors know

a hopeless case if-listen:there's a hell
of a good universe next door;let's go

 - e. e. cummings

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it was very pleasant
not having you around
this afternoon

not that i don’t love you
and want you and need you
and love loving and wanting and needing you

but there was a certain peace
when you walked out the door
and i knew you would do something
you wanted to do
and i could run
a tub full of water
and not worry about answering the phone
for your call
and soak in bubbles
and not worry whether you would want something
special for dinner
and rub lotion all over me
for as long as i wanted
and not worry if you had a good idea
or wanted to use the bathroom
and there was a certain excitement
when after midnight you came home
and we had coffee
and i had a day of mine
that made me as happy
as yours did you

Nikki Giovanni

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I found e.e. cummings in an anthology, as children do. I find a lot of my favorite poets in an anthology first.

Someday, I want to edit my own anthology of poetry, and it will be splendid. On the left side, there will be the poets as we encountered them in textbooks, sweet or inspiring or safe. The left side will be full of “If” and “in Just spring” and “This is Just to Say” and “Kidnapped” and “Petit the Poet”. On the facing page will be the other poems, the ones you only find in the collected editions. The right side will be full of Parisian prostitutes and Kill Whitey and extramarital sex. The right side will have the poems that gave me such a love-hate relationship with poetry anthologies. Because I don’t like “If”, but I love Kipling’s ugly prickly racial poems. I like “The Cremation of Sam McGee”, but I think Service wrote better ballads with darker content. I think that childhood is one of the few times that anyone makes a concerted effort to get people to like poetry, and because the people we are working on are children, we make the poems very safe and soft.

Here are two cummings poems. Imagine the first on the left side of the page, and the second on the right.

hist      whist
little ghostthings
tip-toe
twinkle-toe

little twitchy
witches and tingling
goblins
hob-a-nob     hob-a-nob

little hoppy happy
toad in tweeds
tweeds
little itchy mousies

with scuttling
eyes    rustle and run     and
hidehidehide
whisk

whisk     look out for the old woman
with the wart on her nose
what she’ll do to yer
nobody knows

for she knows the devil     ooch
the devil     ouch
the devil
ach     the great

green
dancing
devil
devil

devil
devil

        wheeEEE

nearer:breath of my breath:take not they tingling
limbs from me:make my pain their crazy meal
letting they tigers of smooth sweetness steal
slowly in dumb blossoms of new mingling:
deeper:blood of my blood:with upwardcringing
swiftness plunge these leopards of white ream
this pith of darkness:carve an evilfringing
flower of madness on gritted lips
and on sprawled eyes squirming with light insane
chisel the killing flame that dizzily grips.

Querying greys between mouthed houses curl

thirstily.  Dead stars stink.  dawn.  Inane,

the poetic carcass of a girl

Both poems benefit from being read out loud. The first is in a book of “monster poems” I read to my kids, with cute little watercolor illustrations. The second one is from the same poetry collection as the first, but somehow I doubt that it would make any sense to children.

“with upwardcringing/swiftness plunge” is a specific motion, a thing of hips and lust. I am glad that I read enough of the safe poems to go find the harder ones, not just about sex, but about what the tv-censors call “adult themes”. But I am also frustrated that there are so many people in the world who never get told that there is more they could go looking for.

Of course, it works in reverse, too. I met Pablo Neruda in his love poems, when I was an adult. I was sort of gobsmacked when I was reading a (really quite good) children’s anthology and ran across a sweet poem about handknit socks, and how his feet are like ships in navy wool. Three pages away, there is a Sylvia Plath poem written about children’s bedtimes. Poets are people, and write about what they know, all the varieties of things and life they experience, and I worry that we all only get one angle on them.

This anthology would not solve the problem, of course, but I hope it would surprise someone, one way or the other.

A mighty creature is the germ,
Though smaller than the pachyderm.
His customary dwelling place
Is deep within the human race.
His childish pride he often pleases
By giving people strange diseases.
Do you, my poppet, feel infirm?
You probably contain a germ.

Ogden Nash

I’ve been sick for a week and a half now, and this is the poem I keep thinking of. Now that I am finally feeling better, I thought I would come post it.

Like many Nash poems, this one has some unusual but effective rhymes, that sort of compel the flow of the poem. Weirdly, my mom frequently misses the “His childish pride he often pleases/by giving people strange diseases” couplet. Consequently, I only remember it half the time.

To His Coy Mistress

by Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

        But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

        Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp’d power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

I know many people are familiar with the first stanza or two of this poem, but I am enraptured by the last one. It’s all about the stupidity of infatuation, and the intensity of how we feel in the moment. “Tear our pleasures with rough strife/Through the iron gates of life.”

This is not actually a poem about dying, or patience, it’s a poem written to get into someone’s metaphorical pants.

Archibald MacLeish is having none of that. He wants to talk about all the fallen empires, and the fact that no one can control the motion of the sun. He wants to point out that there is not actually anything romantic about the grave. The vast empires have grown, in their vegetable way, and then decayed, rotted, slid away.

You, Andrew Marvell

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under the the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on…

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and
metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can’t seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to
go out of their way to say that it is like something else.
What does it mean when we are told
That that Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn’t just one Assyrian, it was a lot of
Assyrians.
However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and
thus hinder longevity.
We’ll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were
gleaming in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a
wolf on the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy
there are great many things.
But I don’t imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple
and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I’ll believe that this Assyrian was
actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red
mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof Woof?
Frankly I think it is very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say,
at the very most,
Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian
cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.
But that wasn’t fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he
had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,
With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers
to people they say Oh yes, they’re the ones that a lot of
wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.
That’s the kind of thing that’s being done all the time by poets,
from Homer to Tennyson;
They’re always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket
after a winter storm.
Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of
snow and I’ll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical
blanket material and we’ll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you’ll begin to comprehend dimly
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

Ogden Nash

Ogden Nash is a part of my childhood. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Custard the Cowardly Dragon, and pithy little couplets about animals, and the Wendigo, and the Termite, and the Germ. When my mother is out of temper, she says, “Go hence, people, go hence, go sit on a picket fence!”

For the record, doggerel is hard to write. We don’t respect it much, because we don’t understand that, but it is both Nashi-an and kind of genius to rhyme “dimly” with “simile”.

This is one of those poems that heavily rewards cultural literacy. The title is from Hamlet, as is the “heaven and earth” line. The Byron poem he is referring to is “The Destruction of Sennacharib”.

That reading is appropriately wanky and pretentious for Byron. He is not my favorite. But the poem is just chock full of weirdo metaphors, past the wolves. Evidently, in Byron’s world, horses breathe pride and sweat tidewrack. IDEK.

I love Nash’s skewer here, the way he paints the specific and general as part of the same problem, of over-analogizing. It’s not that Nash never uses a simile, but it’s sparing and direct, and I think this is why I like Nash better than Byron.

There’s no accounting for my fervent love of Service, though.

During that summer
When unicorns were still possible;
When the purpose of knees
Was to be skinned;
When shiny horse chestnuts
    (Hollowed out
    Fitted with straws
    Crammed with tobacco
    Stolen from butts
    In family ashtrays)
Were puffed in green lizard silence
While straddling thick branches
Far above and away
From the softening effects
Of civilization;

During that summer—
Which may never have been at all;
But which has become more real
Than the one that was—
Watermelons ruled.

Thick imperial slices
Melting frigidly on sun-parched tongues
Dribbling from chins;
Leaving the best part,
The black bullet seeds,
To be spit out in rapid fire
Against the wall
Against the wind
Against each other;

And when the ammunition was spent,
There was always another bite:
It was a summer of limitless bites,
Of hungers quickly felt
And quickly forgotten
With the next careless gorging.

The bites are fewer now.
Each one is savored lingeringly,
Swallowed reluctantly.

But in a jar put up by Felicity,
The summer which maybe never was
Has been captured and preserved.
And when we unscrew the lid
And slice off a piece
And let it linger on our tongue:
Unicorns become possible again.

John Tobias

This is one of the first poems I remember finding on my own. My mom has been telling me poetry my whole life, and I probably had some Ogden Nash memorized before I could read, but this one was all mine.

The year was around 1982, and it was a textbook in a California school. It’s avocado green, with gold print. I know, because my grandmother got me a copy when they were withdrawn from circulation, and I still have it.

It has my first Nikki Giovanni, my first cummings, my first Wallace Stevens, my first William Carlos Williams. As school poetry anthologies go, it was really very awesome, and it was named after this poem.

I loved this:

During that summer—
Which may never have been at all;
But which has become more real
Than the one that was—

But as I read and reread the poem over the years, I became less one of the children up in the tree, and more an adult who is remembering a past that may never have been.

I think one of the things that makes a poem great is that it has an ability to grow with the reader, to mean different things at different points in your life. I am eating watermelon pickle now, but this poem helps me remember all the people I was, when we were spitting seeds at each other.